


since when could flowers grow underground

by wifebot



Category: Mass Effect, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Vanguard Shepard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-03 05:44:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5278904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wifebot/pseuds/wifebot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's like a B-rated adventure vid. Shepard can't believe this is what her life has come to - fighting to keep her SOUL, of all things, travelling through kilometers of caves with really bizarre weather systems and more bizarre people, uprooting an evil flower that's trying to kill everyone - all to escape some magical, dystopian underground nation full of really, really fragile alien creatures who aren't actually aliens at all. It looks like the Reapers will have to wait a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. unnatural silence

**Author's Note:**

> hey kids, time to mix two games that were never really meant to be mixed. ready? here we gooooooo
> 
> title's a work in progress because. dang. im only posting this now on impulse. its very likely i'll just come up with something better later
> 
> mostly i am writing this because the idea of shep interacting with all my fav undertale characters is just. wonderful.

Smell of freshly crushed flowers. Aching ribs and back and head and neck and blood running down from her nose. Dim speck of sunlight far, far above. The unnatural silence of a place far, far from civilization.

Shepard couldn't recall falling so far in her life, and with the kind of life she’d lived, that was certainly saying something.

A fall like that would have killed her only two years ago, but today the world saw Shepard laying flat on her back with her limbs intact and only a sore neck and a few scrapes - alright, admittedly, one or two of them were a little more than _scrapes_ , like the bleeding wound on her arm from when she’d grappled to get back up from the edge she’d caught, then lost her grip, and sliced by a sharp rocky edge further down. All-in-all, however, very few injuries to show she’d fallen at all. Not just uncommon. Extremely unlikely. No matter what the situation was, she should have broken at least a dozen bones, she should be covered in wounds. She shouldn’t be able to sit up, let alone stay conscious.

Either she’d unknowingly, unconsciously slowed her fall with biotics just before she crashed into the ground, or Cerberus’ Shepard 2.0 had proven its incredible resilience yet again. She wasn’t sure which one she’d prefer to believe. Shepard had blacked out halfway through the fall; there was no way to know the truth, but as much as she disliked Cerberus, the idea that she’d been able to biotically accomplish while _unconscious_ what she hadn’t been able to when awake and afraid just meters below the hole far above -- it was bittersweet, with two parts bitter and one part sweet. She wasn’t sure it was even possible. There must have been something else.

Slow. Shepard was careful when pushing herself off the ground, worried she’d find worse injuries, but the dizziness passed and she soon stood, in almost perfect condition, at the dimlit center of a very, very deep hole in the earth. She scrubbed at the blood under her nose with one hand - strained herself too much biotically, but what else could she have done? let herself fall? but fall she had, regardless - and looked around her newest prison. The cavern itself was small in diameter, but the dark tunnel at one end suggested there was more to the cave network. She might have to explore the caves further to find a way back to the surface. Just like old times.

The strange flowers below her feet didn’t look particularly downtrodden, for having a fully-grown woman fall on them from many meters above. They would live, surprisingly. Shepard squinted at them as she rustled through her cargo pockets for a tube of medi-gel to seal and disinfect the gash on her arm. She had admittedly heard of weirder places for flowers to grow, but on Earth, very few species of flora existed that could survive so far underground.

Her pockets came up empty except for the stray granola bar she’d been saving since lunchtime. No medi-gel. No supplies at all. She must have left it all in her pack. Which was at the top of the cavern. That meant no climbing gear, either.

Grimacing, Shepard turned to her last resort: the Omni-tool at her wrist. The translucent orange interface took a few seconds to appear; when it did, the holographic UI wavered dangerously. The tool had been strapped to the same arm as her injury - it must have taken some damage in the fall. Shepard poked through the staticky interface to a comm app, hoping to send out a distress signal - but the moment she opened the app, the entire tool fluttered and buzzed and went dark. Crashed.

It was ridiculously ironic. After surviving (or at least, _mostly_ surviving) dozens of missions with geth, husks, mercs, and charging krogan, her Omni-tool was vanquished by a cavern wall. What a glamorous way to go.

In hindsight, Shepard hadn’t been sure the signal would be picked up, anyway, with the mountain’s magnetic interference. The inconvenience still smarted.

The mission Anderson had slid under the table at her - “I know you must be itching to get back out there, Shepard. I’m afraid I can’t let you go off-planet, can’t give you anything more than paperwork with you off-duty like this, but I can at least give you something like this to keep you from getting rusty” - it was meant to be easy.

Once she’d gotten past the initial bitterness of being grounded, and the injured pride of taking a mission so simple, Shepard had leapt at the chance to get out of Alliance Headquarters and to do something with more movement than transporting paperwork to a superior officer. It wasn’t going to do anything against the impending Reaper attack. That was obvious, but a small mission could at least keep her mind off of how utterly useless she felt, just sitting on Earth like a chicken waiting to be slaughtered. A mission like this was meant as a distraction from the inevitable. A walk in the park, so to say.

Simple search and rescue mission - no hostage situation, no real danger, nothing _exciting_ : only a hiking accident of a vaguely well-ranking individual. Shuttles couldn’t navigate the terrain well enough to find an individual person, not with the radar issues the mountain’s natural magnetism caused, so they needed an operative to go in. The mission could have been done by a three-man squad of privates, in all honesty, and if it weren’t for the hiker’s position as a diplomat or something (they were definitely a vacationing politician, Shepard remembered that part), it would have been handled by the local police force. The assignment felt like more of an insult than a favor, but Shepard supposed beggars couldn’t be choosers.

It looked like that missing hiker was going to have to wait a little while, though.

The cave walls would be impossible to climb, biotics or not. Exploration was the only option. Scoffing in disgust and shoving down the ill feeling in her gut - because she’d survived situations much worse than this one ( _but not alone, not for a very long time, not since long before I was an N7,_ she thought, and immediately stopped thinking it) - Shepard hiked toward the tunnel at the end of the cave room. No guns. No armor. Nothing but her damned biotics ( _too weak to make it back up to the surface, too weak to save Ashley’s life, too weak to protect the Normandy SR1, too weak prevent the Reapers’ return;_ what good were they?) and her fists. At least _they_ would never fizzle out and leave her tumbling down a dark hole with no visible end.

What a fun distraction this mission was turning out to be.

-

Shepard hadn’t been in many caves that weren’t mining complexes or ruined krogan cities. Unlike those man-made (or krogan-made) tunnels, this place was _dark_.

She’d tried starting up her Omni-tool again - even if the flashlight didn’t work, the orange glow would still help her navigate the dark - but the tool didn’t respond to any commands. Resigned, Shepard felt her way through the tunnel with one hand on the right wall and the other glowing a dim purple, a very small, very weak biotic field in the palm of her hand. It was a strain just to keep the light source up. A new headache was building in the back of her skull.

Light at the end - dim, but bright enough to see past her impromptu lantern. She cut the biotic field - _practically exhausted my biotics for now; gonna be trouble if I run into anything fangy_ \- and slowly entered the next room of the cave, looking out for - for what? Varren? Here? Earth didn’t have a lot of underground monsters like Maws. Earth was peaceful. Mostly.

A single flower sat on a bed of grass. Another empty room. Paranoia was a good thing, usually, but she wasn’t in the Collectors' base anymore. Shepard shook herself and kept walking forward.

Until the flower opened its mouth.

“Howdy!” it smiled. Her heart jumped, painfully. Shepard reached for her shotgun, but her hand grasped air. “I’m Flowey. Flowey the Flower!” Its voice was saccharine, but not aggressive. Shepard stood frozen, hand still outstretched behind her. “Hmm. You’re new to the Underground, aren’tcha?” The entire encounter felt dreamlike and unreal. No longer exactly _hostile_ , Shepard stared, confounded, at the talking plant. Perhaps the flower was just a hologram, a VI that perhaps looked more solid due to the low lighting. “Golly, you must be so confused.”

 _Yes, thanks, I am_ , she thought about saying, because hologram or not, the flower seemed friendly enough to give her some answers - but it talked swiftly, as though it had practiced saying this several times over, and she had no time to speak. “Someone ought to teach you how things work around here!”

Shepard’s mind flashed back to every time she’d heard a merc or a slaver say that exact same phrase.

Biotics were out, but she was confident she could stomp a little flower into the dirt if she had to.

“I guess little old me will have to do. Ready?” Shepard tensed. “Here we go!”

....Nothing happened. No. Wait. Something felt tight in her chest. It felt as though her heart had…. pinged? The flower grinned.

“Feel that? That’s your SOUL, the very culmination of your being!” Though she squinted and scoffed, baring her teeth in a scowl, Shepard felt suddenly, inexplicably vulnerable. “Your SOUL starts off weak, but can grow strong if you gain lots of LV!”

The encounter was becoming more and more unbelievable. LV? Perhaps it was a VI after all, and its programmer was a fan of arcade games.

“What’s LV stand for? Why, LOVE, of course! You want some LOVE, don’t you?” A very clearly troubled fan of arcade games. “Don’t worry, I’ll share some with you!”

As bewilderment wore off and suspicion filled its place, Shepard at last remembered how to speak. Straightening her shoulders (when had she stopped standing confidently? how could a flower seem so sinister? it was a harmless plant), she clenched her fist and deadpanned, “I think I’ll pass on that.”

“Really? You think you know your way around this place already?” the flower said, smile unwavering. Little white pellets appeared above the VI, floating and spinning in place. “Let’s put that to the test, then! You see these… friendliness pellets? That’s how we share LOVE down here. Grab as many as you can!”

The pellets zoomed toward her as if by their own volition. Shepard stepped aside and they fell harmlessly to the ground, dissipating and sending up thin, tiny trails of smoke where they landed. The holes left in the ground where they sank in after the fall were several centimeters deep. Maybe not so harmlessly after all. It was all the confirmation she needed.

“Hey, buddy. You missed th--” the flower’s strained voice stopped as Shepard dove toward the VI, one hand reaching out to grab it by the stem. Its prickly green leaves brushed her fingers and her grip was strong around the real, physical form of the flora, but Shepard wasn’t quite in a position to put those two and two together yet.

“I don’t take threats lightly. Not even from a tiny little weed like you,” she growled, her knees pressing into the dirt and her face settling into a mask. Her heart slowed down again - when had it sped up, anyway? She hadn’t realized how out-of-control the earlier situation had felt until she finally had the little creature held prisoner in her hands, its leaves trembling and its face morphing from a smirk to a scowl or maybe something in between.

“You know what’s going on here, don’t you?” it hissed, and its voice echoed eerily. “Y o u  h a v e  p l e n t y  o f  L O V E  a l r e a d y, d o n ‘ t  y o u?” The mask slipped a little; Shepard’s anger and confusion showed through again, just for a second. The flower’s face morphed one last time, this time into something inhuman and fearsome. “You just wanted to see me **SUFFER**.”

White pellets rose up again, much faster and much more menacing than before. Shepard tugged at the flower’s stem, a final attempt to uproot it, but the pellets flew faster as the strange thing yelped, and she was forced to release her hostage as they closed in.

“ **D i e !** ”

Shepard scrabbled backwards in the dirt, tried to call up a barrier. Failed. The headache flared again, but she grit her teeth and pulled harder, harder, her chest tight and her heart thudding. A thin purple sheen flickered into existence around her as the ring of bullets tightened very, very close - and stopped against the fragile surface of the barrier. They pushed, and Shepard sweat, but the barrier was up and she wasn’t about to let it fall, not while she was still conscious.

The flower’s face twisted. “What is this? What are you doing?”

Slowly. She had to fight to keep the barrier up as she crawled toward the flower, the pellets pushing and pushing and it only spawned more of them to send crashing against the translucent shield. Shepard tuned out the little sizzling smacks of bullets against her barrier, just like she had thousands of times, and reached for the little weed with a steady hand.

“Why won’t you just die already!” the thing screeched, and her fingers brushed a golden petal. Shepard grasped it, pulled, trying to rip it off, anything to stop this barrage, but the creature only yowled and pulled back and then -

“Ow, you little-!”

The flower had teeth. What kind of cave system was this.

The shock of being bitten by a _plant_ , of all things, was what did her in. Her biotics flickered, failed, and the barrier she’d struggled so far to maintain slinked away. The monster’s face twisted one last time into an expression of enraged victory, and the bullets closed in at a frightening velocity.

The last thing she remembered was _fire_.

 


	2. a child's bedroom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hoo boy..... im here....... im queer....... im literally a deer...... how am i typing this right now.... deer have hooves......?? not fingers or thumb??
> 
> uh i probably should have written a longer chapter here??? heh but ive had like half of this sitting in my docs forEVER and this felt like an ok place to end the chapter and i also felt pretty guilty for taking so long before offering an update because that's kinda bad
> 
> i am. terrible and unmotivated and uninspired. but i will try!!! im so sorry for bein slow, my kids, my childron, my littles, the blsessed readrs..

Dying a second time felt a little like sleeping in a bed that was too small.

_Done in by a maniac flower, of all things. Shepard, you do know how to pick your battles_ , she thought, and if it sounded a little like Garrus’ voice, well, that was his fault for being such a sarcastic prick all the time.

The afterlife smelled a little like butterscotch. Or was that cinnamon?

Shepard’s eyes opened not to a bright white light, or an eternal fire hell, or a vast ocean, or any other afterlife she might have expected. They opened to a child’s bedroom. Her feet dangled over the end of the bed, socks still on and boots nowhere to be found. Her head felt like the morning after shore leave. Could have been worse. It wasn’t exactly “I Touched A Prothean Beacon And Lived To Tell The Tale (Of Our Impending Doom By Way Of The Reapers)” level of pain, at the very least. _Oh, optimism_.

She took stock of her injuries. Her amp was still warm, and maybe the skin back there was a little raw, but it was nothing too drastic. None of the other burns she’d expected were present, no _new_ wounds; almost as though the evil flower’s pellets hadn’t even touched her - had she been rescued? Her arm was covered in flaky, dried blood, but the gash had healed up almost completely. That certainly wasn’t Cerberus’ tech at work, and the way it had healed - like she’d had it for months and it was finally beginning to fade into a scar - it was nothing like the way medi-gel stopped-up and disinfected wounds. Just how long had she been out of commission?

Sliding off the bed made Shepard’s head and neck throb like they’d been trod on by a Geth Prime, sans N7 helmet, but her legs were steady and the world didn’t tilt - much. A plus over all the other times she’d woken up after passing out from biotic exhaustion.

Priorities. It always helped her to list out her priorities. One: find out where she was. Two: find out how she got here, and by extension who rescued her, if anyone. Three: find that damned flower, pull it up by the roots, and pluck every petal off its smug face. Maybe she was using the flower as a sort of mascot for the entire terrible situation she was in, a dummy to work out her rage on, but honestly, Shepard sure didn’t think the world would be any lesser without the little monster. Four: get a sandwich or something? Using her biotics so much in one day was _exhausting_ , and Shepard was ravenous. Perhaps that priority might shift up a little more in the queue.

The door to the room was shut firmly, but ultimately unlocked. Deciding to sort out priority number one, Shepard twisted the doorknob and slipped into a comely hallway decorated with flowers and paintings. The smell of cinnamon and butterscotch grew stronger. She let the tension ease out of her shoulders. It was just an ordinary house. A very cozy, absolutely ordinary house.

Too many times she’d come to only to find herself in Cerberus laboratories and Alliance medbays and dingy pub bathrooms on both the Citadel and Omega and every bar in between - yet, somehow, Shepard could honestly say this was one of the _strangest_ places she’d ever woken up to. It was just too… decent. It was unsettling; Shepard had never once woken up after losing consciousness and found herself someplace _decent_.

One end of the hallway ended in a blank wall, while the other opened into a larger room. Shepard’s socked feet padded silently over the wood floors into a room with a staircase and a bookshelf and more flowers, and then even further still into another room full of throw rugs and old books and strange flora and a homely, gently crackling fireplace.

Even stranger than the cozy house, stranger than her mysterious rescue - perhaps even stranger than the villainous plant she’d met, though that may have been pushing it  - was the creature sitting in front of the hearth.

She was humming a soft tune as she rocked in a chair, a book in her enormous paws and a pair of tiny spectacles balanced on the end of her pale, velvet nose. Shepard hovered in the doorway, wondering absently what kind of alien world she’d ended up on this time. How had she gotten offworld, anyway? She was meant to be grounded. _Not that I’ll complain about being kidnapped and taken offworld, if it means I don’t have to sit on my ass and file inane paperwork eight hours a day._

She must have made some bemused noise, because the sheeplike creature looked up from her tattered novel and gave a small, surprised smile.

“Oh! You’re awake,” she enthused, setting her book aside and standing to her full height of what was possibly two meters, or more. Taller than a turian, almost. Shepard’s hackles raised, but the stranger didn’t show any signs of hostility. ...Yet. “You had a close call, my child. I am glad you have recovered so quickly. You must be very resilient.” The toothy - _fangy_ \- smile was completely devoid of the saccharine, sinister quality Shepard had ascribed to the flower, and while Shepard still wasn’t completely at ease, she felt that maybe she could interact calmly - perhaps even amicably - with this being. She folded her hands professionally behind her back and.opened her mouth to greet the alien politely.

“What the _hell are you_ ?” was what fell out instead. More questions followed that one, tumbling into the air like a metal hull bursting and vacuum sucking everything into the void. “Are we even still on Earth? Where is this? Which system? What was that _thing_ that tried to kill me?”

The goat-like mouth dropped open and the cow-like eyes had widened in a very eerily human expression of surprise, before she… snorted? A giggle. Shepard was sure she looked very cross, but that seemed to fuel her laughter more.

“I - _ha!_ \- I am sorry! You are quite the curious one, aren’t you?” Shep didn’t respond, but she stared with suspicion, still waiting for an answer. The fuzzy lady was not phased. “Of course we’re on Earth, my child. Where else could we be?” She laughed a little more, as though the idea was ludicrous. Shepard wondered for the billionth time whether this was all a fever dream. “I imagine this is much different from the world you know, however. You are simply in the Underground, home of monsters like myself. Many of us live here, in these ruins and elsewhere, though not all of us are friendly - as you saw.”

“The…. Underground,” Shepard intoned. “Of Earth?” The goat-lady’s amicable expression morphed into amicably bemused. She nodded, and took a breath to speak again, but Shepard was having some sort of internal crisis. “And - wait - you call yourself a… monster?” There was no possible way for this supernatural being to have come _from Earth_ , a planet populated almost solely by humans until only a few decades ago - even then, there were scarce few aliens living on the home planet of the Systems Alliance. And clearly, whatever she was, it was not human.

When had this alien creature, or her kin, arrived on Earth? For them to stay hidden this long, for there to have been no documents of it - it must have been a very _, very_ long time ago.

“That is correct, although I prefer to be referred to as Toriel! Ah - but might I ask _your_ name, my child?”

“I am not your child,” Shepard snapped, pulled from her previous state of bland, shocked thoughtfulness - she missed the look of surprise and dismay on the lady’s visage.

Priorities. It always helped her to check her priorities. Priorities one and two: complete. She knew where she was and who had fixed her up/ Priorities three and four might have to be put off, however (though from the churning of her empty stomach, it would soon make its protests widely-known). Where-ever she was, she needed to get back to the… surface world… as soon as possible. She _did_ technically have a mission going on. “I am Commander Shepard of the Systems Alliance, Council Spectre,” _not that either of those titles meant much to anyone important anymore,_ “and I need to return to the surface as soon as possible.”

“I am sure you are eager to get home and, er, see your family,” (Shepard was certain the twitch of her over-stressed face muscles was _not_ a wince. Certain.), “but you must be tired from your fall and your wounds. And I am sure you are hungry, no? I am making a pie - it only needs to cool before it will be ready to eat. You should stay a while and build up your strength.”

“Listen, I don’t have time to chat, lady. I need you to tell me where the nearest exit is, _now_ -” and this was when her stomach decided to pitch in with a particularly loud and long _hurrrrgle_ , and Shepard’s imperious speech ground to a halt. Toriel looked at her with smug, knowing eyes and a small, victorious smile.

“The pie will be ready to eat soon. Please, rest until then. You may take a nap, or read some of my books, or I would be happy to converse with you, if you like,” she said, settling back into her rocking chair and placing her book in her lap.

“I... ,” and she wanted to rebuff the suggestions, but the smell of cinnamon and butterscotch was doing strange things to her stomach, and her legs were still shaky and sore from her exertion. “...What sort of books do you have?”

The cow-eyed Toriel smiled with joy as Shepard slouched into a chair and as she described a few of the books organized on her shelf, and Shepard quietly, reluctantly settled in for what was quite possibly the first moment of true relaxation she had managed since prior to Eden Prime.


End file.
